Luke Alexander's blog

I hope we don’t lose the icons of the early days of video gaming.

Once I assumed that these were safely sheltered in the balmy lands of retro, there to live out a gentle and dignified existence on the front of t-shirts.  But the generations of men are like the gently-falling waves of alien invaders, and before too long I think those who think kindly upon Pong, upon Mario, upon the ascii world of Rogue, will have dwindled.

Or perhaps they belong in the past, slightly legendary.  They are good candidates for a new mythology – a digital mythology to populate the distant mist of a digital age.

The punishments set in motion by the Olympian gods of Greece and Rome are nothing, for example, next to the many tasks of Pacman.  Haunted by the ghostly sherbet Eumenides, and consumed by a limitless and ravaging hunger, he can fail to invoke pity in no onlooker.  Like Tantalus, surrounded by sweet water and overhung with succulent fruits which he can never consume, cherries flicker before our semi-circular hero but he is never sated; like Sisyphus his tasks are never complete, but reset as he nears the summit.

I like the bleakness of these myths – they seem to tally with what a myth should be.  And such powerful imagery!  The lone man defending blank nothingness against alien invaders; the futile destruction of ever increasing meteors.

A recurring topic, at least between myself and whoever I was talking to, on a recent stag weekend was what exactly the purpose of the stag do is.  Which, for a classicist (albeit a largely retired one), can only lead to one inevitable question: what is the term’s origin?

The internet seems unusually reticent to suggest an answer, and so I suspect getting close to an answer will mean a couple of evenings in the British Library.  Some initial leads:

• ‘Stag’ has a now outmoded meaning of “man alone” (evidenced in mid 20th century American fiction and resurrected in the language of Mad Men, so it must be true).  Variations included ‘going stag’, meaning a man attending an event without a date.
• Much is made of the obvious point that a stag is a male animal with a lone tendency.  Which is fine, but doesn’t constitute a reason for it to become common parlance any more than a ‘bull weekend’ or a ‘cock weekend’ might.
• Not necessarily an answer to the above point, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology has an interesting note on the origins of the word stag itself.  The Old English word stagga or stacga (both reconstructed; not sure what from) may have had a purer meaning than our modern ‘stag’ – of ‘male animal’, compared with the Old Norse word staggr which meant ‘male bird’.  Excellent and very cool; but I’m not convinced its reinvention as a term for batchelorhood is due to the wide circulation of philological footnotes in 1920s New York.  Try again.
• By far the most popular origin story for the event itself is the Spartan wedding theory.  In prescis: Spartans held parties before weddings where male friends met and reminisced.  Ignoring the problem of the 2450 year age gap between these parties and their modern equivalent, it’s a bit fascile to suggest that the Spartans were the first to come up with this concept.  The habits of the Spartans were a constant fascination of the Greek historians, which was then refashioned as creepy Victorian anthropology about a hundred years ago, the remnants of which are now seen in badly researched internet anecdotes and primary school syllabuses.  The Spartans may be attention-grabbing, but the reality is that the practice of male meetings before weddings would have been extremely common across the Greek world, largely because social gatherings in the ancient world, especially at an aristocratic (and therefore history-worthy) level was consistently men-only.  That the groom might have a drink before his wedding is not an unusual idea, and that it would not include women is pretty much a certainty – not only in Sparta, but in Athens, Corinth, Thebes, and far far beyond the Greek world.

I’ve only really just started my digging – interested to see where it leads.  Just need to make sure I don’t go following any Celtic horned gods down any blind alleys.

Update: the Online Etymology Dictionary has the date of origin at 1848 in American English.